A Call for Silence

As in the old roué’s quip that “a drink before and a cigarette after are the three best things in life,” sometimes the most important moments of our lives lie in an unspoken ellipse. The same is true of some of our most beautiful sounds. On this cd 34 artists provide personal views into that sonic ellipse, suggestions for listening to that which might otherwise pass you by: count-offs, groove grit, tape hiss, breaths, rests, cd glitch, guitar hum, audience anticipation, reverb tails, room tones, minutes of silence, the calm before a storm.

00 0’00” John Bowers “silence silenced”
01 2’41” Daniel Levitin “anticipation”
02 2’16” Rory Shackles “between ragin‚ and hell”
03 0’29” György Kurtág “némajáték — veszekedés 2 (dumb-show — quarrelling 2)”
04 1’39” Michael J. Schumacher “the other boulez”
05 4’33” people like us (Vicki Bennett) “cage silenced”
06 2’08” Paul Davis “s.b.d.”
07 2’21” John Levack Drever “pastoral pause”
08 2’00” kapital band 1 “how many people are in this room?”
09 4’32” Richard Beard “i am not sitting in a room”
10 1’44” David Hoyland “a minutes silence for the queen mum, 2002”
11 0’12” Valerian Maly “apple (windfall/ fallobst)”
12 2’27” Peter Cusack “the quiet room”
13 3’50” Adrian Newton “bird hide”
14 1’39” Jens Brand “silence/silent landscape”
15 2’11” Alvin Lucier “quiet coffee”
16 1’29” Lori Talley “bird song”
17 4’06” Dale Lloyd “lobby and lebeg” *
18 1’29” Eric Leonardson “erster berliner”
19 4’37” Aaron Siegel “the sound was …”
20 0’16” no noise reduction “0’0,060” for a rock and roll band”
21 1’55” Justin Wiggin “eeg recording of no sounds in the surrounding area”*
22 1’33” Anne Welmer “krikle”
23 3’11” Andy Keep “my laptop colony — colony in my laptop” *
24 1’04” David First “tell tale 2.1”
25 4’34” Dan Evans Farkas “humbucket”
26 2’05” Yasunao Tone “imperfection theorem of silence”
27 2’03” Stephen Vitiello “world trade center recordings”
28 2’50” Matt Rogalsky & George Bush “two minutes fifty seconds silence for the usa”
29 1’57” David Watson “ventilator”
30 3’37” Thomas Joyce “unspoken conversations”
31 2’36” Francisco López “untitled #102” *
32 1’05” Ted Collins “lullaby”
33 1’23” Christian Marclay “unused space”

* please note that these tracks have been edited for this compilation.